One day in this fair summer of our tale, Rodd turned into the bookshop to consume the lunch he had bought at the German Delicatessen-Magasin up the road. He found the bookseller bubbling over with happiness, dusting his books, re-arranging them, emptying large parcels of new books, and not such very subversive books either except in so far as all literature is subversive. 'Hallo!' said Rodd. 'I thought this was the slack season?' 'I'm rich,' retorted the bookseller. 'The dahned publishers are crawling to me. They've had their filthy lucre, and they know I can shift the stuff, and they're on their knees to me, begging me to take their muck by the hundred--at my own price.' (This was a pardonable exaggeration, but it was long since the bookseller had had so much new stock.) 'If I ever want a change,' said Rodd, 'I'll get you to take me on as your assistant.' The bookseller's jaw dropped and he stared at Rodd. 'You might do worse,' he said. 'That's the second offer I've had this year.' 'Oh! who made the first?' 'Ah!' The bookseller put his finger to his nose and chuckled. 'Ah! Some one who's in love with me.' 'There are too many books,' said Rodd. 'Too much shoddy.' He turned away to the shelves where the plays were kept--Shaw, Barker, Galsworthy, Ibsen, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, Tschekov, Andreev, Claudel, Strindberg, Wedekind, all the authors of the Sturm and Drang period, when all over Europe the attempt was made to thrust literature upon the theatre, in the endeavour, as Rodd thought, to break the tyranny of the printed word. That was a favourite idea of his, that the tyranny of print from which the world had suffered so long would be broken by the drama. The human heart alone could break the obsessions of the human mind, otherwise humanity would lose its temper and try to smash them by cracking human heads.... Rodd always thought of humanity as an unity, an organism subject to the laws of organic life. Talk about persons and nations, groups and combinations, seemed to him irrelevant. Humanity had a will, and everything had to comply with it or suffer. At present it seemed to him that the will of humanity was diseased, and that society here in London, as elsewhere, was inert. He escaped into his imagination where he could employ to the full his dramatic energy. On the whole he hated books, but his affection for the Charing Cross Road, and for the bookseller, drew him to the shop dedicated to the efforts of revolutionary idealists, whom he thought on the whole mistaken. He desired not revolution but the restoration of the health of humanity, and like so many others, he had his nostrum--the drama. However, the air was so full of theories, social and political, that he did not expect any one to understand him. 'Have you got Mann's new book?' he asked the bookseller, who produced it: forty plates of Charles's pet designs with rather irrelevant letterpress. Rodd bought it, and that moment Clara entered the shop.